Many individuals, businesses and organizations occasionally have a need for custom printed materials, such as a birth announcement, a party invitation, a brochure describing a product or service, a promotional postcard notification about an upcoming sale, or any number of other things. Simply placing plain text on a plain background is usually not satisfactory. Most people prefer that their information be presented in a pleasing layout combined with one or more attractive images that have some thematic relevance to the purpose of the document. Few individuals, however, have the time, desire and expertise to experiment with possible layout/image arrangements or to search for, upload, resize, and position desirable images. Typically, only larger enterprises with regular and substantial printing requirements are able to employ a specialist with graphic design skills.
One option for individuals and smaller businesses desiring well-designed, professional appearing documents with attractive layouts and images has been the local print shop, where they describe their requirements and look through representative samples. Multiple visits may be required to review proofs, make corrections or pick up the final printed product. As an alternative, various specialized software products are available that present a customer with a set of pre-designed document templates in which the user can insert the user's personal information to allow the user to prepare personalized greeting cards, invitations or the like. These software products must typically be purchased and installed permanently on the user's computer and require at least some familiarization and training to be used properly and efficiently. Further, the printing devices connected to the typical personal computer used by an individual or small business are often not suitable for, or capable of, producing quantities of quality full color materials.
To provide an alternative to the above approaches, printing service providers, taking advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers, provide document design services for user's desiring to create customized documents from any computer with Web access at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. These service providers typically provide their customers with the ability to access the service provider's web site, view product templates and enter information to create a customized markup language document. After the document has been designed by the user, Web-based service providers also typically allow the user to place an order for the production and delivery to the user's home or business of quantities of high quality, printed documents of the type that the user is not capable of producing with the printer systems typically connected to most personal computer systems.
One network-based product design system is disclosed in co-pending and co-owned U.S. application Ser. No. 09/557,571 entitled “Managing Print Jobs”, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The system discloses a downloadable editing tool that allows a customer to create and edit WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) markup language documents in the customer's browser. The system makes a number of pre-designed product templates available for customer viewing, downloading, and customizing. The customer can upload the electronic document to a server and place an order for production of the printed products.
Pre-designed document templates that can be individually selected and downloaded to assist the user in creating a document in the user's browser are known in the art. Typically, a number of different templates with various images and design features are provided to offer the user a range of choices. To help the user to locate specific types of templates of interest to the user, template offerings are sometimes divided into predefined search categories (e.g., Type of Industry) and, within a category, into predefined specific subcategories (e.g., Construction, Education, Insurance, Real Estate). After selecting a category and subcategory, the user is presented with thumbnail images of available templates. If the user selects one, the selected template is downloaded to the user's computer system along with downloaded software tools that can be employed by the user to create a personalized electronic document.
Each template is typically individually designed. The template development process includes the definition of all details of the template, such as defining the position of all image and text areas in the template, selecting, sizing and positioning images in the template, defining colors to be used for template elements having a color attribute, and so forth. The template designer will adjust the elements until the designer is satisfied with the overall appearance of the template. This hand crafting of template design is time consuming and, therefore, a significant expense for the service provider. To continue to expand its template offerings and to present potential customers with as many pleasing and varied options as possible, the service provider must typically employ a staff of professional designers. Further, the service provider may have thousands of images that the service provider would like to provide for use, and that customers would like to use, but that cannot be quickly made available and exploited because of the time involved in individually designing templates on a one-by-one basis.
There is, therefore, a need for a novel and flexible template generation system that allows a service provider to greatly increase the number and variety of templates offered to customers without requiring a laborious individual one-template-at-a-time design method